How Energy Became the World's Most Powerful Weapon

Summary

Podcast Summary: American Power Episode: How Energy Became the World's Most Powerful Weapon Date: August 12, 2026 Hosts: Nat Towsen (B), Chad Scott (C), Mr. Global / Matt Randolph (A)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the hidden machinations of the global energy market and how energy—especially oil—has become the world's most potent geopolitical weapon. Drawing on breaking news about undisclosed oil inventories and the strategic uses of energy, the hosts analyze how energy markets are manipulated to generate profit, sway elections, and shape the outcomes of modern conflicts. The conversation moves from technical discussion of under-reported oil reserves to broader questions of energy’s use in political, economic, and military strategy—including its connection to national security, resilience, and even climate change messaging.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Breaking News: Under-Reported Oil Inventories (03:56–18:27)

• Discovery of Hidden Oil
  • Recently, an investigative report revealed that global oil inventories were under-reported by about 500 million barrels in 2025—a staggering 15–17% of global commercial inventory. This news helps explain why oil prices remained higher and avoided a crash despite OPEC’s reported production increases.
  • A (Mr. Global) [04:28]: "You can't lose a half a billion barrels of oil. You can't miss, you can't miscount."
• Coordinated Market Manipulation
  • OPEC, particularly Saudi Arabia, is implicated in intentionally concealing oil to artificially support prices, enabling greater profit while avoiding price collapse—a coordinated effort involving multiple countries and multinational companies.
  • B (Nat) [10:06]: "So when you're saying half a billion barrels of oil showed up on the market, these are from diverse sources, right?...It would have to be above margins for a bunch of different countries."
• Differentiating Reporting Agencies
  • The hosts clarify the difference between the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the U.S.-based Energy Information Administration (EIA), with the latter being stricter but even then far from infallible.

2. Oil Fraud as a New Norm? (18:27–23:52)

• Market Fraud and Geopolitical Impact
  • Missing such a large quantity of oil goes beyond error—it's market fraud, impacting global pricing and country economies.
  • C (Chad) [18:30]: "This sounds like they can just do this. And we don't actually know what the market really looks like..."
  • A (Mr. Global) [19:55]: "The likely number is even probably higher than a half a billion barrels... that means you're talk[ing]... fraud to the tune of 50-ish billion dollars."
• Cultural Reflections
  • The panel jokes about Western “values” spreading globally as grifting and scams become more common in other nations—including OPEC countries sharing the "spoils" of their price manipulations with their populations (in contrast to U.S. models).

3. Hidden Reserves as Tactical Advantage (25:11–31:58)

• China's Strategic Stockpiles
  • Discussion on how China may use hidden oil stockpiles to strategically neutralize market impacts and shield itself during conflict.
  • Strategic ambiguity about national energy capacity is militarily advantageous—C (Chad): "If China is able to hide that... we don't truly know what their capability is."
• Distinction Between Commercial and Strategic Inventories
  • The re-classification of inventories leads to an understanding that only commercial supplies directly affect market prices.
  • A (Mr. Global) [30:57]: "If China had 10 billion barrels of oil in their strategic reserve, it would have no impact on the global price."

4. Energy as a Geopolitical Weapon (32:29–45:51)

• Methods of Weaponizing Energy
  • The four points of leverage: dependency, scarcity, replacement difficulty, replacement time, and diplomatic leverage.
  • Case studies: 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, Russia's gas cutoff to Europe during the Ukraine war, and the U.S. and UK's use of control over financing/sanctions/insurance.
  • Geographic choke points like the Strait of Hormuz play a huge role (Iranian leverage).
  • A (Mr. Global) [39:11]: "Energy is by far the greatest weapon on earth to me, because you harm the people. You, you, you harm the economy..."
• Examples of Energy Infrastructure as Targets
  • From pipeline sabotage to hitting oil tankers, targeting energy disrupts not just profits but entire economies and national resolve.

5. Energy and Election Influence (45:51–52:02)

• How Oil Prices Sway Elections
  • OPEC has a history of manipulating oil supply (either cutting or flooding markets) to influence U.S. politics and hamper presidents they dislike—especially those with pro-human rights agendas.
  • A (Mr. Global) [47:55]: "OPEC uses energy as a weapon against the United States on a daily basis for most of my life. And people just... only recognize it during, like, the oil embargo of the 70s."

6. National Resilience and the Case for Renewables (52:05–66:20)

• Energy Independence as Security
  • Countries with robust domestic energy (U.S., Norway, Australia, Russia) are more resilient to manipulation; those with vulnerabilities (Japan, EU) are investing in renewables for security.
  • Renewables provide distributed, more attack-resilient infrastructure, and reduce susceptibility to energy-based threats and manipulation.
  • B (Nat) [53:30]: "Building domestic renewable energy is obviously good for reducing our dependency on foreign oil and our susceptibility to this kind of manipulation."
  • A (Mr. Global) [55:15]: "Any energy that you can create that is non fossil fuel... gives you and disconnects you further from the global energy markets and specifically OPEC."
• Climate Policy Messaging Failures
  • Criticism of Democrats tying renewables too closely to climate change, rather than selling them as national security priorities.
  • The messaging for renewables should have focused more on pragmatic, immediate benefits like independence from OPEC.

7. Who’s Responsible for Climate Change? Individual vs. Collective Action (66:20–73:35)

• Debate Over Accountability
  • Hosts agree that focusing exclusively on individual action (e.g., recycling, bulbs) ignored the far greater corporate responsibility and systemic issues, which made meaningful climate action difficult.
  • B (Nat) [66:45]: "It's not individual responsibility, it's corporations...The problem is not like, oh, it's just these guys pumping oil into the river. They are, don't get me wrong. But...the problem is that we only have like 10 companies and they are allowed to do whatever they want."
• Evolution of Public Attitudes
  • As energy and climate crises become more immediate and personal (wildfires, extreme weather), public attitude is shifting towards accepting the need for change.

8. Renewables as a Response to Existential Threats (73:35–78:42)

• Nations like Ukraine, Taiwan, and South Korea are rapidly ramping up renewables to ensure basic survival under threat of war, showing that necessity drives innovation and investment fastest.
  • C (Chad) [74:55]: "Ukraine...is one of the fastest producers of renewable energy, builders of renewable energy, because they need... more resilient systems than even nuclear."

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• A (Mr. Global) [04:28]: "You can't lose a half a billion barrels of oil. You can't miss, you can't miscount. We're talking about...15 to 17% of total global inventory that was not there."
• C (Chad) [18:30]: "This is a racket. That's not a true market there."
• A (Mr. Global) [21:35]: "Are we living in the golden age of oil fraud?"
• B (Nat) [53:30]: "I'm bullish on...divesting from global oil markets...building domestic renewable energy is obviously good for reducing our dependency on foreign oil and our susceptibility to this kind of manipulation."
• A (Mr. Global) [55:15]: "It's a huge national. Any energy that you can create that is non fossil fuel... disconnects you further from global energy markets and specifically OPEC."

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:56 – Start of Hidden Oil Inventory Story
• 08:16 – OPEC’s Motive for Hiding Oil
• 18:27 – Fraud Discussion
• 25:11 – China's Strategic Oil Reserves
• 32:29 – “Weaponization” of Energy (Chad’s Points)
• 36:18 – Russia's Use of Gas as a Weapon in Europe
• 45:51 – Energy’s Political and Election Impact
• 52:05 – National Resilience and Renewables
• 55:15 – Renewables as Security, Not Just Climate Policy
• 66:20 – Individual vs. Corporate Climate Responsibility
• 73:35 – Renewables in Ukraine and War Zones

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"Least Worst Part of My Week" (80:55–91:35)

• Matt (Mr. Global): Story of Thallus D'Souza, a Dreamer and Wendy’s shift manager who—supported by his boss—worked his way from community college to a Yale pre-law scholarship. (80:55)
• Chad: Former war adversaries in Bosnia and Herzegovina uniting to jointly fund removal of deadly land mines, making old battlefields safer for children. (84:53)
• Nat: Announcing a NYC climate comedy workshop during Climate Week with CU Boulder, aiming to empower young comedians to create engaging climate change material. (88:42)

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Takeaways

• Energy as Leverage & Weapon: Oil and energy are not just commodities but instruments of enormous state power, with hidden reserves and market manipulation prevalent on a shocking scale.
• National Security = Energy Independence: Divesting from global oil markets, investing in renewables, and building resilient domestic infrastructure undermine adversarial manipulation and boost national security.
• Messaging Matters: Framing renewables as a tool for economic and strategic security may hold more persuasive power than solely focusing on long-term climate change warnings.
• Global Lessons: Nations under existential threat innovate quickly—renewables bring not just environmental and cost benefits, but security and resilience in wartime.

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Closing Quote

"Power corrupts, but American power corrupts Americanly."
— Nat Towsen [91:35]

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For more analysis on the forces shaping global events at the intersection of energy, strategy, and politics, subscribe to American Power.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

You're listening to American Power. I'm your host, Nat Townsend, stand up comedian, political speechwriter, many other forms of writer and most likely to make me forget to get a haircut for around three months because it's an audio medium, podcast host and there are people watching on YouTube and I just don't know what the advantage is until today. There you go. As always. I'm joined by my panel of visually beautiful experts, our expert on the military and foreign policy, Chad Scott. Chad, how's it going?

[C]

It's, it's going really well. I'm glad we're back on our normal cycle here, man. It caused, we caused a bunch of confusion. Like I, I, if you, and I know you guys don't read the comments, but I was reading the comments and they're like, where's the least worst? And I was like, no, this is a special episode. You only get least worst on Wednesdays. And so good to be back on our normal Wednesday track.

[B]

And I know we, our loyal listeners were so confused by us putting out two episodes in one week. And I'm, I just want to say thank you so much for, for powering through that with us, for understanding this format change. Which is the least worst is every Wednesday and then Friday, you never know what you're going to get. It's a crazy grab bag Saturday. So we'd like to keep you on your toes that way. Maybe it'll be an hour long episode, maybe it'll be an American power extra, a deep dive from one of our experts. Speaking of which, joining us as always, our expert on oil, renewable energy, all things energy and global energy markets, Mr. Global himself, Matt Randolph. Matt, how's it going?

[A]

I mean not to move anything straight to the front, but I think the new least worst part of my week is that people actually listen long enough to get to the least worst part of the episode. Like I'm excited about that.

[B]

I'm glad you're not saving that of the episode though because we wouldn't be rewarding those people. The least worst part of the week is me. What Time magazine as kind of reward. I don't want that. It's like Walter Mitty, make a choice. I, I do appreciate our listeners listening to the end and I love that they actually like that segment. It, I, I, I, I don't hate that they like the least worst is what I mean to say. It's the least worst feeling I have about it. Yeah, wasn't it your idea I was my utterance and you guys held me to It. I think you uttered it. Yeah, I, I definitely. I say a lot of things and then other people say, you have to do that again. And then I go, oh, I guess I did say that. And that's.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

The magic podcasting.

[C]

No one else does that. Like, I listen to many podcasts out there and everyone has their own little things. They do. And us, I think our little. One little thing that makes us unique is that least worst story because it does it.

[B]

Mine is yelling at our editors to add sound effects where I personally feel they would be useful. Yeah. Not necessarily listening.

[C]

And they can change.

[B]

Can we get a lightning spray when I say that? Kyle, if you don't mind. Chris, if you can do a custom. Yeah, thank you. Jamila, if you don't mind. After. After I said that. The second. Okay, thank you for the audio listener. I'm doing this sort of like a hand motion indicating a lightning hit. So this has been scintillating and we have a really exciting episode ahead of us today. There's a story I really want to get right into because Matt posted a video about this this week, this weekend. If you're not following Mr. Global on TikTok, Instagram and all other legal in America platforms, get over there right now. Because he's putting out videos all the time covering some of the topics we cover here, but also other things that we don't necessarily cover here and along with the breaking news. But anyway, Matt, you put out this video about effectively under reported or unreported oil production in 2025. And I was hoping you could just start off by giving us. I hadn't heard about this at all. Could you give us a breakdown of what this story is?

[A]

Yeah, so before I get into that, I. I want to just clearly state that if I exist on any illegal platforms, it's AI. I don't participate in that, but I have seen myself and I could fully understand why someone would create an AI version of me. Maybe for only fans or. Or pornhub. I. I get it. Like I've seen this. Like I've seen.

[B]

This is why I encourage. On all legal platforms. I didn't say you don't exist as an aid pig nude on not legal platforms. I've seen your followers.

[A]

So. Yeah, enough. Enough of that. No Wall Street Journal investigative reporter with the Wall Street Journal yesterday uncovered that they've discovered that there's about a half a billion barrels more of global inventory of crude oil supply, commercial crude oil inventory than we previously thought. And that is one. One of the reasons that Oil prices haven't gotten to the levels a lot of people predicted, in addition to, of course, the market manipulation. And they found a report that was put out days before the war started that accounted for this 500 million barrels of previously unaccounted for oil. Now, to take you back in time a little bit to around March, I believe it was, of 25, OPEC came out and said they were going to drastically increase production. And so I immediately said, this is going to cause the oil markets to crash. And then oil prices fell, but the markets never crashed. And in the months following that, that oil was never showing up in inventory. So OPEC was Reporting this, nearly 2 million barrels a day of higher oil production. But the oil was never showing up in global inventories, which is people like me and oil analysts, traders, banks, financial institutions. That's one of the main things we look at. You know, we look at supply, demand, you know, how much production, how much, you know, current investment impact, future production. We look at all this stuff. But the global supply of any commodity is obviously the foundation to which you build your work on. Like what's going to happen in the future. Well, it all starts with what you have right now in supply. So what it means is what it appears, because I was telling people that I thought OPEC was pulling a head fake and just saying that they were going to increase production, but never actually did it because the oil wasn't showing up in inventories and that was what was keeping the market from crashing. Well, it appears that days before the war started, somebody found the oil with, with the iea. I want to point out the IEA is an international reporting agency. It is the International Energy Agency. The EIA is the one that is just the United States. It's part of the Department of Energy. You know, the administration, the EIA has still never reported this. Half a billion barrels of oil. So what this means, and this will, this will work great into Section A when we talk about using oil as a weapon. But what this means is this did not one, it did not happen in the United States. This was happening overseas, particularly with opec. They were hiding oil inventories to artificially keep the price of oil higher. So by hiding this oil, they're able to produce more, yet it doesn't drive down the prices a lot. So they get to capture all that profit and value from producing more without having the natural forces of the market drive down the price when you're oversupplied. That's why they did this. And a half a billion barrels of oil is a significant amount. Like you can't lose a half a billion barrels of oil. You can't miss, you can't miscount. We're talking about probably a half a billion barrels would probably be somewhere between 15 to 17% of total global inventory that was not there.

[B]

So you're saying there's just no way this is any form of oversight accounting for this? This is.

[A]

Well, so one of the reasons that we use the EIA is because it's really the only reporting agency. Even though we don't even trust the EIA that much. It is the only one that has to follow certain standards and has to report to people. And when you're taking data internationally from anyone, even our allies, I'm not, I won't hesitate for a minute. I don't care if it's Europe or anyone else. It's really difficult to trust the data, you know, so, you know, the least trusted data is always going to come from China. The second least trusted is probably opec, you know, and then you just go up the ladder of of least trusted. But at least in the United States, there's can be some accountability, no accountability for international reporting when it comes to data, especially with oil, natural gas and all that kind of stuff. So what this means one is like I said, they were intentionally under reporting oil production and inventories to keep the prices inflated. We know Saudi Arabia specifically has had some issues with debt recently in recent years with their budgets. And they're kind of in a new phase of their history. You know, they don't, in Saudi Arabia, they don't want to have any debt. It's part of their culture is that debt is not good. Completely opposite of the United States. For, for whatever reason, we think debt's fantastic. That's why we get 40 trillion of it. But they don't like debt over there. So, and weird, the last few years they, they've had some annual budgets where they had some debt, they had ransom deficits. That is a huge deal in especially Middle Eastern countries. So this was definitely something that was coordinated and, and pulled off and it's been discovered.

[B]

So let me ask you a, like a practical question, right? This is oil that's being generated in multiple locations through many of the different countries that OPEC comprises. Obviously you're drawing the connection to Saudi Arabia because they have a major financial stake in all of this. But when you're saying half a billion barrels of oil showed up on the market, these are from diverse sources, right? Yes, within the OPEC alliance. So that would what you're saying represent a coordinated effort to increase production but not report it. Is that what's happening? It looks like, yes.

[A]

I would suggest a coordination not just with countries, but also companies internationally that report this stuff. And keep in mind, these inventories are reported weekly throughout the entire year. And you know, so we're on top of it all the time. And then suddenly in February of 2026, when they do their full year inventory report, days before we go into Iran, suddenly the IEA has a half a billion barrel revision. That means none of this oil was reported in inventory for the entire year of, of 2025. And it had to be coordinated by multiple countries, multiple companies working within those countries, and potentially some companies that operate in the United States but also operate in. Within opec, like, you know, Exxon. I'm not saying they participated in this. I'm just saying big oil that exists in the United States also exists internationally. That's why they're big. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So it could be any number of a dozen companies and countries that were involved in this. But there's absolutely coordination because one country can't just do this. It was too much oil. It was more oil than one of those countries would have produced.

[B]

Right. And we know that they reported some of the oil that they did produce. So it couldn't even be max capacity for any of these countries. It would have to be above margins for a bunch of different countries.

[A]

So then why another thing, opec. You know, I don't know if you know how OPEC works, but you know, they basically give all the countries quotas. You're allowed to produce this much. And a lot of times they fight because some overproduce, because they want to be able to produce more than they're allowed to. And I think that might have something else to do with it too, because we know there was several countries in 2025 that were violating their quotas, they were overproducing. And maybe that oil is getting hidden somewhere to support the price structure. What I will say without a doubt is had all of the oil that was produced in 2025 been accounted for throughout the year, we would have had a very significant oil market crash. In 2025, it got down to like 58 bucks. I think in the end of January at 25, you could have easily seen it at $40 a barrel, which in this market, with inflation, $40 is absolutely a crash. When it cost 70 to $80 to break even in the United States, $40 is totally a crash. Had all that oil been reported we would have had a market crash easily, which is what I thought was going to happen. But it never did. And then I couldn't figure out why it didn't happen.

[B]

Good day for the Mr. Global Information Empire also. But let me ask you another technical question. So why after not showing up on the weekly inventories does it suddenly show up on the IEA's annual report?

[A]

That's what they're trying to figure out really.

[B]

So that is what they're trying to me to be like a self reporting. Like is that not obvious rather than. Well, just seems very obvious. Yeah.

[A]

The answer that needs to be or the question, I mean that needs to be answered. This isn't Jeopardy. The, the question that needs to be answered is where did they get that information? Now they're saying, you know, what they're saying is that what they did is they started tracking oil inventories from the beginning of the war and the shortages and the production. And this is an unbelievably tedious task. Like I would never even consider doing this myself. It would be. I can't even describe how tedious this. But basically they tracked how much oil we were short and how much inventories were falling. And you're talking thousands of tankers, you know, dozens and dozens of oil producing countries. You know, this is a monumental task. And what they determined was oil inventory should be here and it's only fallen this much and we've lost this much. That means we were a half a billion barrels short under reported. So basically at the beginning of the war they were saying we had about three and a half billion barrels of commercial. This is not strategic inventories like SPR. This is commercial crude. And now they're saying it's 2.7. That's 800 million barrels. If you ask anybody, they'll tell you we're short at least 1 1/2 billion barrels is what we've lost since this started. But we've only. Yeah, but we're only 700 million barrels shorter on inventory. So obviously the level was significantly higher than we thought it was and it's

[B]

been slowly entering the market or it has been entering the market at some points.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Just not recording inventory, thus keeping the prices a little more.

[A]

Yeah. And really all this means is, is all the stuff that was predicted earlier in the war is still potentially going to happen if this continues. It's just going to happen later than we thought.

[B]

It does explain why there has been less of spike in those prices or a crash in those prices. And then, you know, we're talking about spike in other costs as a result, hasn't, hasn't accelerated quite as quickly as we thought when we, when we talked about this a few months ago. And I'm, I wonder if that's related. I'm curious from the, I mean, you've laid out some of the reasons, but from the, from the perspective of the OPEC countries, what would be the purpose of hiding? I mean, is it just to keep the price, to keep the prices up by, by making supply look lower? Like that's the purpose for everyone, to just make the market look like there's less supply?

[A]

I mean, we knew in mid-2023 that we were going, we were going to enter like late 2024 through 25 and 26. We were probably going to be in a low. Like we knew that because this stuff runs in really long cycles. And so we knew this, you know, two, three years ago that we were about to go through a cycle of relatively low oil prices. And I believe that's when they said, yeah, but it's not going to be as low as you think it is. You know, I think they hit oil to keep. You have to understand what even $5 a barrel means to a country like Saudi Arabia that produces 8, 9 million barrels a day. I mean, you're talking, you're talking 40, 50 million bucks a day. And if you can just change a number on a spreadsheet and make 50 million bucks a day more, who's not going to do that? I mean, I wouldn't, I would never

[B]

do that, but so stop, first of all, stop asking. And also to all these EIA recruiters or IEA recruiters who are asking Mr. Global to do the global oil inventory, he's already said on record it's too tedious and he won't do it, so back off.

[A]

I would like to point out, if you remember early in the war, oil prices spiked significantly. And I talked a lot about the paper price of oil and physical price of oil and how the physical price, I think it got, I think one of the grades of crude got up around $170 a barrel. You know, the paper, the futures market prices never got that high and then when they came down, they never recovered even to 100. And that a lot of people were really confused about that. And I think the word was getting out that the inventories had been vastly underrepres reported and that has. We know there's market manipulation in the futures market, probably by the U. S. Treasury, maybe that, that Witkoff and Kushner Those guys that Iran's been accused of doing it. Possibly, but this would be a significant addition to that in suppressing oil prices. If, if other people around the world knew that inventories weren't as low as as previously believed, that would have a huge damper on, on oil prices spiking. And now that this story's out, we'll see what happens. But

[B]

what do you think it would have looked like if they. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Chad. You got a question?

[C]

Well, I was going to say. So I guess this, this brings up a major concern for me because this is a, a traded commodity. And do we actually know how much ex. Oil actually exists in the moment? Because other realms, whether it's like stock trading, this would be fraudulent. Like you like things like dark pools or iceberg orders or the hidden ownership tricks that people use. Yeah, they can temporarily hide what you're doing when it comes to stock trading. You can do things like disclosure, avoidance, but eventually you got to lay all your cards on the table. This sounds like they can just do this. And we don't actually know what the market really looks like, which can be dangerous for little old me here who's like, I'm gonna put some money into the oil markets. I have no idea what I'm doing because generally when it comes to stocks or hell, even the real estate market, there's a physical thing you can go look at. But now you're telling me that we have just oil that can be floating somewhere or sitting somewhere and people just lying on paper to, to say hey, just to manipulate prices. That, that's a racket. That's not a true market there. So I'm just, Is that what we're, you're saying is we don't really know what this looks like in real life?

[A]

Well, every, every inventory report has the word estimate.

[C]

Oh yeah. The catch all.

[A]

But you don't even miss estimates by half a billion barrels. You don't miss a, a global oil inventory estimate by 15, 16, 17%. And the thing is, the likely number is even probably higher than a half a billion barrels. It's probably more like 6, 7, 800 million barrels if we're being honest. So that means you're talk a fraud to the tune of 50 ish billion dollars is, is the value of, of that oil that they were able to sell but not report an inventory to keep the price higher. So that's a massive fraud. And, and no one has ever believed, at least in my world, that the numbers were 100% accurate. Like, you know, there's always a probably a 1 to 2%. You know, it's kind of like polling 1 to 2% accuracy, whatever. But this, when you get into, when you're getting into half a billion barrels missing, that's definitely fraud. That's definitely coordinated. It's definitely manipulating global markets for your own, you know, gain. And a lot of countries in the Middle east have surprisingly kind of struggled a little bit financially in the last few years because they're trying to actually get off oil. You know, Saudi Arabia visions, their Vision 2030 plan, you know, they're trying to get off of depending on oil for income. They're diversifying their income. They're, you know, they're trying to find new sources of revenue generation. And I think this all plays into that because that costs a lot of money to completely diversify your entire economy.

[B]

Are we living in a golden age of oil fraud?

[A]

I mean, possibly. I mean, I'm, you know, I mean,

[B]

this is unprecedented, right? Like between, between this and the, and the Trump administration and the Kushner's. Like, it does seem like more money is being made and I don't know the history, but does seem like more money is being made now on specifically energy market fraud than in the past.

[A]

Scams.

[B]

Yeah, scam. Yeah, I mean literal, literal scams, grifts, whatever word you want to use for it. And my follow up question to that is, if more money is being made in that space than ever before, is this one of those things where by the time you've heard of it, it's too late to get in on it? Or what do I got to do to start manipulating oil markets myself?

[C]

That's trying to get in on that

[B]

to the tune of billions. Because honestly, this podcast, Gabe, is fine, but I don't know, it just seems easier than I thought it would be. You just lie and say there's less oil.

[A]

Absolutely.

[C]

Enron did it in California.

[B]

Oh, yeah, they did. I mean, they knew that.

[A]

I mean, we've, we've talked about that part of the world. You know, more Western type values being accepted over there. I, I think this is a huge sign that that's actually happening because it looks like they're all turning into crooks just like we are here.

[B]

But no, and for all the anti globalists who thought Trump was collaborating, here he is spreading American culture and values to other countries. Turning.

[A]

I mean, it's no doubt Western values have definitely spread around the world because now they're all criminals. So. Yeah, I mean, well, not just criminals, but grifters, right?

[B]

Like, it's the, it's, it's your, your working, grifting into the fabric of your government. Right. That, like, that's what we've done, essentially. Whereas governments once protected people from scams, we now actually have a scammer at the, at the helm.

[A]

There's, there's kind of a little bit of a romantic flavor to it, though, over there, because when Saudi Arabia grifts people, their grift actually flows down to their people because their oil is nationalized, so their people pay less for gas and they pay less for energy. And just like the other countries over there, too, when we grift in the United States, the people actually get harmed more because all the money is hoarded at the top. At least over there, they share their grift with their people.

[B]

That's a good point.

[A]

That's rather romantic. You know, I, Yeah, I think it's great.

[B]

And if you don't know anything else about the government of Saudi Arabia, that sounds really good.

[C]

Yeah, in a, in a box. That sounds amazing.

[B]

But, yeah, it's. And I assume that all this stuff about, like, driving cars and journalism, I surely handle all that really well as well as well, Right.

[C]

Yeah, Yeah.

[B]

A model society.

[C]

So it's too late for me to

[B]

get in on the grip, though. I just want, if we, if we could loop back to that.

[A]

Well, I mean, I'm an American.

[B]

That's the problem. How can, how can I, as an American citizen start.

[A]

If you can, if you can afford to buy a contract for wti, you can get in on it.

[B]

All right.

[A]

It's about $80 million today. One contract.

[B]

You hear that, listeners? Chad, what's your question?

[C]

We need some advertisers so we can get in on it.

[B]

No, but I think this is preventing advertisers right now me openly saying, I will take your money to do fraud. It might actually be illegal to give me money right now.

[A]

I feel like it's not going to be running commercials on American power. I just, I feel like that's not a thing.

[B]

Well, if they give it a cursory overview, they might just be doing AI search to say, oh, yeah, American power. That sounds like our thing.

[C]

Well, and it's, it's interesting because looking at when I watched the video that you put out, Matt, it was really fascinating and it took me to where my space of thought process is. So China, when you, when this war started, it seemed like China was weirdly not affected by it. Like, their imports supposedly fell from eleven and a half million barrels to, like, Seven but they had no meaningful changes in their, their economy, their consumption rose during that time. And so I'm like, immediately like they're drawn on inventories that we don't see. And honestly it makes strategic sense. So your enemy, you're not necessarily enemy, but your strategic foe looks out at the world and goes, looks, you look at the US and the Chinese can assess, well, the US says they have this many barrels of oil and can produce this many barrels of oil. So we need to calculate for that, that war making capability. We do the same thing for China, we do it for Russia. It doesn't matter. We have portfolios on every single oil producing country in the world. And if China is able to hide that, if they're just, they're fine, they're finding ways to make it disappear. We don't truly know what their capability is. So this may be not just a grift but a tactic for these countries to truly hide what they're capable of doing from a wartime manufacturing standpoint. It's just really fascinating because when you were talking about the hidden oil markets, I was like, we hide everything else. So our enemies don't see all of our stockpiles of everything is usually hidden. And now we're seeing oil hidden in a way that it's presented as a wartime necessity. So China doesn't want us to really know how much we have. It's just very fascinating that I, I just kind of made that connection when I was watching that video. So it was very, it was a very good video. I just wanted to toss that in there.

[A]

Yeah. And we actually have, we believe we have a pretty good idea of what China has. I don't know that we actually do, but we believe we know what they have. It's somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 billion barrels of oil in their strategic reserves. And the reason we believe that is because we believe that it's all currently stored in tanks on the surface that we can see with satellite images. And we also know that they're currently in the process of constructing underground storage similar to what we have on the Gulf Coast. And China really did the world a huge favorite. And I kind of wondered if they were going to do it because in my mind I'm like, they have so much oil that they bought for literally nothing. They were bartering with Venezuela and Iran and, and those deals, they're not even really paying Russia. Yeah, they'll loan, they would loan Venezuela $10 billion and say, just pay us back in oil until we tell you to Stop. And it's like a buy here, pay here type thing or, or it's like getting a TV at rent a center that you, you make payments on for seven years. And so they have all this oil and the average price they paid for it is probably less than $20 a barrel. I've quoted 40 before. But the truth is we really don't know when it's probably 20. But why would you buy physical oil when it was 150? Why would you buy that oil for 150 when you have a billion barrels or one and a half billion barrels that Venezuela gave you to pay off their debt, like. And that's what they were really doing. And we all benefited from that a lot because it pre prevented a ton of the price spikes. It put a, it put 5 to 6 million barrels of oil a day back on the market that they wouldn't have been consuming. So they actually did us all a big favor. And it did confirm at least some of what we thought about how much oil they had. Because to just cut off say 6 million barrels a day, that means you have a significant amount on hand just sitting there that you got really cheap. So. And that's what they did.

[C]

Yeah, it makes a light bulb golf because it.

[A]

I'll go ahead, Matt. I was just going to say, unfortunately they're back to buying oil again. They're restoring those, those previous levels and we'll just see if they continue to do that as prices rise. We don't know yet.

[C]

And it had. So the light bulb that went off is of course they would lie about their oil reserves because you just said it all of their stuff. So everyone talks about how oil has, or oil has. China has this massive strategic reserve of oil and they do, however, they have put it in tanks that are just easy to strike with missiles. So the US could easily wipe out their entire oil reserve pretty easily. It's not, it's not hard for us to do that. So of course they would sit there and go, well, we should lie about this so we can hide it out in the ocean or hide it somewhere else as we build. Because all of the majority of ours is in like salt mines. Am I correct? I believe we put a lot of ours in salt mines. And so ours are protected from those missile strikes and the ability of enemies to destroy our oil reserves. They don't have that luxury. So a minute of war happens. That's one of the first things we target, probably. And they, and so they need to not. They need to have that strategic ambiguity. So we don't necessarily know how much oil. And they. We can sit there and think, oh, we got it all. And then it's like Iran. Suddenly 700 more drones show up, even though Donald Trump said, we got all their drones and Navy. It's the same situation. And so it's, it's the same playbook and it makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

[A]

No, so I'm sorry, you know, this

[B]

was about OPEC countries. Is there evidence in this report that China is also hiding oil? No, there's just because speculating based on the similar.

[A]

We're talking about commercial inventories.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So it doesn't matter if China is hiding oil in strategic reserves because it's not on the market for sale. So we're sticking. This is strictly commercial crude inventories that impacts the futures market and, you know, the price. If oil. If China had 10 billion barrels of oil in their strategic reserve, it would have no impact on the global price of oil.

[B]

Right. Because it's not in that supply that's driving.

[A]

It's not counted in supplies, just like RSP is not counted in global inventories. And it's, it's counted in inventories, but not commercial inventories, which is what impacts price.

[C]

Yeah. I took it from a, from my perspective of not necessarily as the oil expert, but thinking strategically of who is going to who. Who benefits from hiding the, the amount of oil they have. And I don't think there's no one that has more of a reason to do that than China on, on earth right now.

[A]

So they're not hiding it for financial purposes. They're hiding it for strategic purposes, like you're talking about. OPEC hides it to make more money.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

China doesn't really.

[C]

I think the US Does.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Well, maybe we can use that to segue to something else we want to talk about this week, because that method of using or different ways of using oil supply and manipulating oil markets for military advantage, for geopolitical advantage. Something that we want to get into a little bit deeper here and talk about ways in which energy is used as a weapon globally. And, Chad, I was wondering if you wanted to start off the discussion.

[C]

Yeah. So this is kind of a fascinating area that I've just started diving into, mainly just so I could become as smart as Mr. Global here and just framing it in a way that is, that is kind of how it works on the geopolitical geostrategic stage. And it really boils down to four, I call it 4.5 points of leverage. So you have your dependency on Energy, the scarcity, the replacement difficulty, and the amount of time to replace. And then also you have kind of this additional diplomatic leverage that you have, because some countries just don't have energy, but they have strong diplomatic. Great Britain, for instance, is just one of the diplomatic powerhouses. So those type of things are very important, and countries use that in different ways. So you see it one of the most direct ways, one of the easiest ways is just an embargo or just a supply cutoff. We've seen this with in 1973, the Arab oil embargo. We saw those gas lines in the United States. It basically demonstrated how producers could connect energy access to another country's foreign policy demands. Russia tried a similar method, and it worked briefly in Europe after the. They invaded Ukraine. They were trying to leverage the oil markets to get Europe to back off. The immediate effect was higher gas prices, electric prices, inflation. However, you can go too far. And Russia did. Russia went too far, saying, we're shutting you off. You better not support Ukraine. And now Europe has pivoted to find other capabilities everywhere for getting oil and natural gas and energy. And so in the short term, Russia may have caused a small amount of pain, but in the long term, Russia lost a massive customer, and that customer probably isn't coming back, at least definitely while the war is going on, if not while Putin or his, whatever his lackeys take over that regime is in place. And so what we see is, is that's one form of weapon, weaponization of oil is this. The embargoes just shutting it off. The US we have, we can embargo as well, but we don't necessarily do. We use something that's actually a bit more powerful in our ability to manage global financing, insurance, shipping and sanctions enforcement. And that's kind of what we're doing to Iran. We can target specific producers, banks, the different tanker. The Brits can do this because they manage the insurance market for the most part. And so that's another way to weaponize it. There's a very crude way of doing it, which is what Iran does, but it's incredibly effective. You just control the geographic choke point. And we have several of those. You have not only the. Obviously, as we've seen, the Strait of Hormuz, what I call the Red Sea corridor, which is Bob El Mandeb at one side, and then you have the Suez Canal at the other. Egypt did that. They decided to shut that down. Panama, let's be honest, they could do it too. They control the Panama Canal. The US Would have A pretty big fit about that. But these are everywhere. You have the Taiwan Strait, you have the, the Malacca Strait, which would absolutely harm China in a way that they probably would be. They probably would have about 90 days of the Malacca Strait before they could. They would have to seriously back down. So there's just kind of a broad overview, and I'll let Matt explain more because he's way smarter than this. That's kind of the weaponization. You have the ability to manage the threat flows, which is the supplies that you have. You have the, the ability to manage the money, which is what the US does. And then you have the ability to manage the geography, which is what Iran is doing to us right now. And apparently Oman is getting on board with that and saying, hey, we can make some money out of this too. So, yeah, I mean, your thoughts on this, Matt?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So one thing I think a lot of people don't truly understand is that Russia had cut off Europe from natural gas before the Nord stream was blown up. And, and so when they blew up, when whoever. I'll put it to you that way, Chad might have an opinion, but I have no idea who blew it up. But when the Nord stream was blown up, it was a response to me. I think it was a response to Russia cutting off Europe already. There wasn't. And that's why when it was blown up, there wasn't. Do you remember the video of the ocean, Chad, when. Of the ocean bubbling?

[C]

Yeah, there was like. It wasn't a. I always wondered that why wasn't there some massive oil spill?

[A]

Because there wasn't hardly any gas flowing through it already because they had already cut off Europe. So basically what was just left sitting in the pipeline is what leaked when they blew it up. Like there wasn't millions of cubic feet of gas flowing through that thing every day anymore. They had cut Europe off and that, you know, I think it was three to four weeks later after they cut them off in, like, stages, if I remember, they like, they cut off a certain percentage and then another percentage, and then they eventually got to where you ain't getting none. And I think it was three, four weeks after that is when it was finally blown up. And. And when they blew it up, they blew it up, I think, in like two or three, four different places along the pipeline as well. But there wasn't any gas flowing through it when it was blown up. That's why it wasn't this huge ecological. A bigger ecological disaster, because it was just what was sitting there. It wasn't actually flowing under pressure when that happened. And a lot of people don't realize that. So when they're trying to figure out who blew it up, I'm like, well, who did they cut off? Like, I, you know, it's, it was like they were using, Russia was using that pipeline, which is an energy pipeline, as a weapon. And someone said, okay. And that was their response to it. That was their counter attack, was to blow the damn thing up. As now, I don't know if we did it or if Europe did it. Hell, Russia might have done it on their own, but I doubt it. A lot of people think that, but who knows? But the oil embargo 73 is definitely the thing in my mind that, that sticks out the largest when you think of oil as a weapon or energy as a weapon. And energy is by far the greatest weapon on earth to me, because you harm the people. You, you, you harm the economy. Like it, it runs through every facet of life. So when you use it as a weapon, you're, you know, you're not, you're not collapsing a building, you're collapsing economies, which is, to me, strategically a weapon that exceeds all other weapons, except maybe the nuclear weapon. But you know what I mean? Like, there's no better weapon than crippling someone's economy and, and bankrupting them. And that is such a powerful weapon in itself.

[B]

And when you often see early military strikes on oil tankers and on refineries, like they're just, it just inflicts that much pain because the energy is so ubiquitously necessary.

[C]

Same reason Saddam burned down as he was leaving. He saw the US Was going to beat him. So he's like, you can't. If I can't have it, no one can.

[A]

And so, yeah, if you're going to, if you're going to shoot a missile at a boat, I'm going to shoot a missile at the boat that has, you know, $180 million worth of oil on it. Like, that's the one which is going

[B]

to, which is not only $180 million worth of profit, but also is going to disrupt a multiplicative amount of commerce.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

It's not just the profit on the sale of that oil. It's the, it's what that will, you know, second and third order consequences of those sales.

[A]

When you, those second and third order consequences are you drive up energy prices for everyone in the country. That is the ag. In this case, it's the United States. And then they turn on their leadership and they don't approve of the war anymore. And suddenly you've won, right? Like, you know what I mean? So while Iran may not spend a trillion dollars a year on their defense, you know, defense, like, I think it was the last episode I said it was like 7 billion or something.

[B]

They don't have been 9, but still,

[A]

because all they have to do is drive up our energy prices enough to make us say we quit. And that's exactly what they're doing. Like, that's how you want.

[C]

There's a. There's a preventative aspect to it as well, where even a country as small as Taiwan will look at China and go, here's the deal. We have this missile capability that you decide you want to start building up across the strait, the Taiwan Strait, which we would see, the whole world would see. It'd be just like we saw the buildup outside of Ukraine. They would have to build up a massive force in Taiwan. The minute that first boat launched, they would immediately start launching, launching on Chinese oil infrastructure. Those tanks that we just talked about, their strategic reserves. But not only that, the backup of the pipelines that come out of Russia, they would strike those. So within 48 to 72 hours, most of Chinese oil would probably be destroyed by the Taiwanese. And that is a preventative measure that is telling China, hey, we have an understanding here that you are a bigger, stronger military than we are, but we can bring you to your knees. We're using energy. That's your energy against you. So it can go. It can go all different ways. And you see this actually right now in Ukraine. Ukraine has yet to blow up some of Russia's oil pipelines. Even though the. Russia's oil goes through their country. They have absolutely the capability. They're happy to blow up refineries and things like that. But there are some levers that Ukraine holds on to, to potentially keep Putin from going to the ultimate measure of. Of using nuclear weapons. Because their nuclear option, quote, unquote, nuclear option is we can absolutely devastate your true oil industry or oil industry here. When it's moving pipelines and things like that. We don't want to because we want this war to end. And basically that. That keeps this war confined because Russia doesn't want to move the world, move into that realm. We kind of saw it when they. When the Ukrainians struck an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea and Iran said, hey, we're going to attack you. Ukraine looked at Iran and said, flat out, you do this, it's going to be a problem for you, and we're going to Continue to, to strike your infrastructure now too. And we have the capabilities, as you can see across Russia. Iran said, all right, we're cool. Never mind. We're. We're just gonna. And so that kind of. It's very power. It's a very powerful tool. As Matt was saying. I mean, every, every. Yeah, it's a deterrent. Yeah, it's a deterrent a lot. I truly believe the integrated nature of the energy markets is just as powerful as the nuclear deterrent on the international stage, because people just don't want to lose access to. It's not just like being able to charge my smartphone. It's like we got to be able to cook food and clean our water and stuff like that. So this is an extremely powerful tool. And the more we integrate, even just price caps, the G7 will price cap Russian oil. And that gave. I mean, you saw India and China like, yes, we can make a good chunk of money on that. But Russia was devastated by that. Their economy is in really bad shape because the G7 led by the United States, but also, you know, like Japan, United Kingdom, etc, came out and said flat out, you guys want to trade and trade with Russia, we're gonna price cap it. And if you go over those caps and pay them more, you're gonna feel the sanctions in China, as powerful as they are, they were like, we got you. We're gonna, we're not gonna mess with your. Your stuff. We're gonna get it to that. We're gonna buy oil on the cheap, but it's not gonna be as cheap as we want to because they're, they don't want to lose access to things like the dollar. So there's the financial aspect. Britain threatened the insurance companies of oil tankers because they manage. I think Lloyd's is the biggest insurer of all the oil tankers. So there it's, it's so fascinatingly interconnected where a lot of countries have their hands in the pot, and when some one country pulls their hand out, it causes a huge ripple effect. So it's both good and bad. We have a lot of power in the markets with multiple countries, whether it's geography with Iran or whether it's production with Russia or it's financing and production with the US or insurance with Britain, it keeps this balancing act going. But when someone does something stupid like the US and decides we're going to attack Iran and that forces them to close the, the Strait of Hormuz, that balance gets knocked off kilter and other countries start to wonder. I wonder if we can do that, I wonder if we can close, I don't know, straight, like, Britain's, like, we can close and start charging tolls for Gibraltar, because they manage that, even though it's Morocco and Spain that are on either side of it. Or maybe Denmark's, like, with the Danish straits. Russia, you got to call across to the Danish straits to get your oil out into the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. How about you pay us a fee? And so it becomes very, very fascinating, but also very precarious where those geographic pinch points can become a problem, or the US Just using its power over the. With the dollar to. To create kind of a pseudo choke point in financing. It's. It's all interconnected. Interconnected.

[A]

Well, there's also a lot of times it's used as a weapon, and we don't even recognize it. Like, I recognize it. And when I say it, people look at me like I'm crazy. But when you talk about impacting elections of world leaders around the world, like, you know, you drive up energy prices in a country, you can impact their elections. And we've seen OPEC do this to the United States. They've been trying to do this to the United States for years. They did it under Barack Obama. You know, how do you explain record high oil and gas prices under Barack Obama when we had the largest increase in oil production ever in history? And it was because OPEC was cutting production throughout his entire presidency because they wanted him gone. They did the same thing to Joe Biden. You know, record oil production. You had the Trump 2020 deal, which was specifically designed to sabot the incoming president. Like, OPEC uses energy as a weapon more than anybody, and they use it against the United States more than anybody. They drive up, they cut production, and they had, like, I think, four or five production cuts during the Biden administration to artificially keep oil over $100, knowing that Joe Biden would get the blame for that, because they hated Joe Biden. They don't like any president that, that's. That supports human rights, basically, is what I believe it comes down to. But they sabotaged Democratic presidents in the United States mostly, I think, due to human rights issues. And they also sabotage US Companies. You know, at the end of the Obama administration, they kept oil prices as high as they possibly could for most of the Obama administration. And when that didn't work, they flooded the market and completely crashed the entire entire global oil market and put a bunch of US Companies out of business to make Obama look bad that way. Like, they they crashed oil by artificially inflating the market. But this time or that time, they actually reported the inventories, unlike this time where they didn't report it. And if you notice those oil prices in 2025, they kept them right there at a level that made them the most amount of money possible with increased production, but also kept the price of oil low enough where US Companies couldn't invest. Like they were right there at the perfect price point for it to benefit them the most while they were increasing production and not suffering the consequences of lower prices. Because OPEC knows we need oil to be, you know, 70, $75 in the United States for oil companies to continue drilling. So what did they do? They kept it at 68 while increasing production. And oil should have been 40. They were able to keep it at 68. You win everything because you get more market share because production in the United States drops, because we can't drill at 68. But it doesn't crash the market in the United States so it doesn't get the oil industry pissed off at Donald Trump.

[B]

Like, so it wasn't as it wasn't bad enough per, per barrel to fully crash the industry. I'm just, just low enough to prevent us from producing domestically.

[A]

Yeah. And they fully understand the price structure we need to, to continue drilling. And in the United States we have to drill a lot to maintain our oil production because our wells, the flow of production from our wells depletes rapidly. You know, Saudi Arabia can compete with us in production with like 20 drilling rigs and we would need like 450 to keep up with Saudi Arabia because their oil wells just flow thousands of barrels of oil a day forever like ours fall off very fast. So we have to keep just drilling, drilling, drilling, drilling, drilling. And Saudi Arabia knows all this and they have fine tuned this weaponry, this energy weapon that they use over the years. They used it on Obama, they used it on Bush at the end of his presidency, they used it on Biden, and they used it during the Trump administration to keep prices high. But they did it in a way that wouldn't hurt Donald Trump. Like they, they figured out a way to put as much money in their pocket as possible without hurting Donald Trump.

[B]

And that's what you think is he's buddy, buddy with MBS and doesn't care

[A]

and Trump isn't out here promoting human rights.

[B]

You know, that's what I'm saying, specifically because he is, he's openly celebrating their autocrat leader. Sorry, I don't mean to be cooked. Sometimes I Shy away on the podcast from saying things that are horrific because I don't feel like reliving the worst news stories of the past 10 years. But you should totally clear. Yeah, he's. He's friends with the autocrat because he allows him to murder journalists. Like, that's not a. And, and many other egregious human rights, you know, violations that Donald Trump loves and wishes that he could do here without as much pushback as he gets for occasionally succeeding in doing those things. But he's still. We still don't live in a. Where you can openly be like, murder that guy. I don't like what he wrote in the news. And, you know, meanwhile, of course they're sympathetic to Trump. You know, it's the kind of global order that they're looking for.

[A]

Yeah. And what's fascinating is Obama actually talked about this during his presidency, and everyone said he was crazy. You know, Obama was saying, we can't drill our way out of high oil prices. OPEC is. OPEC is, you know, oil production doubled in the United States under Barack Obama. That's never happened in the history of the world. The biggest oil boom in history and were still, you know, oil way over a hundred dollars a barrel. So, you know, that is OPEC controlling as much as they can, you know, policy of the United States, leadership elections, all of it. Like, they, they have an enormous amount of control over us. And so when we kind of reached back and kind of regained some of our energy independence from them, where we weren't, we weren't so reliable on them for, like, physical barrels of oil, they were like, that's fine. We don't have to sell you the physical barrels as long as we can control the price. Because if we can control the price, we can control your elections to some degree. We can make politicians very unpopular, you know, and so that's what they do. Like, OPEC uses energy as a weapon against the United States on a daily basis for most of my life. And people just, they only recognize it during, like, the oil embargo of the 70s or some other event. But it's literally an everyday thing going on between us and opec, and it's a war we can't win, by the way.

[B]

That's fascinating. I'm curious.

[C]

Well, it also.

[B]

Sorry, go ahead, Chad.

[C]

Well, I was actually. Because it made me think of something you said previously, Nat, and I'm going to get. I want to get your thoughts on this, too. But one of the strongest counter weapons to countries that are using oil as resilient or as a weapon is just resilience. And so one of the easiest ways to be resilient is just to have it like the United States is probably in the overall strongest position. But then you see countries like Norway, who is incredibly resilient because they have major oil and gas exports. Canada, Canada and Australia are similar. Russia is another one that the reason they're so hard to pry out of Ukraine is because of their resilience. But then you see countries that have made active efforts to become more resilient. The Chinese model that we just talked about, but they have vulnerabilities that are far greater than the U.S. the European Union is the probably the most improved case, but. But they had major vulnerabilities. They've kind of diversified. And then you look at Japan, who has been making huge efforts to prepare because they're extremely import dependent. But they have strong alliances. And it once again points to the alliances, the Gulf states, et cetera. But as you've alluded to Nat, one of the greatest resiliencies you can have is renewables. I mean, do you have any thoughts on that specifically at all?

[B]

You asking me? You're asking Chad? I'm sorry, you're asking Matt?

[C]

Either one of you? I mean, I know I. Well, I mean, I can't discern between

[A]

Matt and Matt a lot of times.

[B]

Sorry. Yeah, I mean, I'm bullish on. Obviously, I think that that divesting from global oil markets is one, you know, one of the. And building domestic renewable energy is obviously good for reducing our dependency on foreign oil and our susceptibility to this kind of manipulation. And I actually would be curious to hear what Matt thinks about the same issue because on one hand, you know, we were actually talking to this with Senator Martin Heinrich last week. I was talking, you know, I was asking him about replacing major sources of energy and we're talking about nuclear and geothermal. And I pointed out that, you know, one of the crucial differences between the two is that one creates toxic waste that lasts 10,000 years or longer. And an interesting thing that point he made is like, you know, solar arrays are really valuable. Geothermal is really valuable. Concentrated solar power. I don't think we actually got into CSP on that episode. But single sources of energy like a nuclear reactor are hard to recreate. Now what I'm curious about, what I think is interesting is does a more distributed grid or does a more distributed generation make from a, like military, from a weaponry security standpoint, does that make us more or less vulnerable? Like if you can Take one nuclear reactor offline. Obviously you can take a lot of energy offline, but there are still pipelines, there are still energy, there's still energy grid work that can be disrupted one way or another. So I'm curious what you think, Matt, about, you know, would that, am I being optimistic to assume that, that reducing our dependency on oil would also be a national security boost as well?

[A]

Not at all. It's a huge national. Any energy that you can create that is non fossil fuel boost is, is good for national security and gives you and disconnects you further from the global energy markets and specifically opec. And one thing I was very critical about and everyone disagreed with me and I don't understand why. I, I guess because I'm an sometimes but I felt like the Democratic Party huge mistake by tying renewal, the need for renewable energy to climate change. Because to me you sell what you can. Right. And it's very hard to sell, especially in American like if we don't do this now, it's going to be really bad in 20 years. Well, Americans are the, the, the very epitome of instant gratification.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, and it's really hard to sell this climate change thing, but it's easy to sell eliminating our dependence on opec. Like that is something I think Republicans, Democrats, everyone can get behind. And it's not that the climate change thing isn't 100 true, it's that it's just not the best selling point. And I thought from the beginning the whole pitch or, or whatever you want to call it to renewable energy should have been more about relieving national security as you're talking about and removing us from being dependent on opec. To me, those are things you can actually sell and messages that resonate and we'll get people to say, you know what, OPEX and then lay out examples where OPEC's been us over for decades. And people will say, you know what, you're right. Let's, you know, everybody won't. But I think you get much, a much higher participation rate and much more approval by selling what you can. And I felt like it was too focused on climate change. Not that that's not a pressing matter, not that that's not a huge thing. But like I said, you, you sell what you can. Right. And, and climate change as the years go by is becoming an easier sell as it becomes more obvious to everyone as we sit in 115 degree temperatures. Right. But in those days, in the early days when it mattered the most because obviously combating climate Change, it's like a retirement plan. The earlier you start, the better your results at the end. That's one thing I was critical of. I was like, stop talking about climate change. And people would take that, that and say, well, you don't believe in climate change. And I'm like, no, I do believe in climate change, but I also believe in selling what you can. So you're a thousand percent correct on the national security thing. Disconnecting us from opec, any source of energy, renewable, nuclear, otherwise whatever you want to call it, is better from a security standpoint and disconnecting us from OPEC than fossil fuels will ever be. The, the climate change is actually the most important thing, but it's the hardest thing to sell. And so that's where I'm at on that.

[B]

Like, yeah, I think that's, that's a really good point. I, I would like, I want to add a little bit to what you said about the Democratic strategy there because I, I think they've been terrible on, on the climate and renewables for, in many ways and I think in many ways get too much credit just due to being the default less bad party in that regard. And not saying Democratic administrations haven't done good things, but I think the messaging around climate change, which we called global warming at the time, right in say the 1990s was very okay to some degree. There was a belief that if you told people there was a global threat that the world would band together and solve it. We were, this was the we are the world era. There was a little, there was a lot of economic prosperity and also like this sort of belief of like, hey, we're all in this together, maybe we really can make a change. And I think that was obviously not true, but I think that the strategic error that I would take a bigger qualm with just then, I think, I don't, I don't know, I wasn't an adult in 1991. I can't decide if that optimism was completely foolish. But I look at the way that we talked about global warming as I, and the environment as I was growing up is, there was this huge, and this is from liberals, there was this huge focus on individual responsibility, right? Like global warming is real and that's why you need to recycle. And like ultimately we were sold a deeply false bill of goods that was class dependent, right? Like if you're middle class in America all of a sudden you'd better be buying the ecosystem friendly version of that thing that those, those non caring low class people are buying, you know, it's the same, it's the same thing as like the cultural position of organic food. Right. Like organic food is good for a lot of reasons. However, is also created as a middle class position to not only, you know, brand things that aren't necessarily healthier, but also to create class division, to create these like class types where we decide what is best for certain groups of people. Right. So one of those issues of the 1990s was global warming and do you recycle? Do you participate in anti global warming action? And you know, in retrospect the global recycling's gotten a lot better. The recycling of that era was pretty inefficient and did not stem the tide of global warming and wouldn't have if instituted en masse. We have reformed recycling since don't accept bad information about that at home. But you know, I think a lot of the way we used to look at global warming was like, well that's why we all need to grow up now and not like, hey, aren't there, you know, companies just dumping oil into the river right now? Like aren't there, you know, aren't there just like unrestricted emissions going on that are orders of magnitude larger than any individual citizen can create or probably even imagine? And I feel like that. Oh yeah, absolutely. And that approach was just never talked and like luckily and unluckily it's now at the point I've said this in other episodes, you used to have to be like it's the right thing to do. And now you're like hey you greedy. It's less expensive. You're like, we solar costs less money. Get solar panels in your state. But I mean it sucks that we got there. But you're. I think, I think you're right that like, like a pragmatic approach should always have been the approach. The thing I'm disagreeing with a little bit is that like I think that the, it wasn't that it was wrong to mention global warming because I do, I think it's a similar, like, I think it's like the threat's not going away. We do have to have a way of talking about it. But I also think that the, they didn't name the real problem or the real culprit. It was, it just became like another, you know, electoral branding issue.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, virtue signaling where you were shaming others essentially. And I think it self destructed, unfortunately a really, really important issue that it's unfortunate because we could have. Unfortunately we're all humans and so we should have us versus Vers them, not us versus Us. Like my. I'm not. I'm. People were. It started devolving into people judging. Like my neighbor's not. It didn't put his recycling bin out and stuff. And it became when. Yeah, you're right, Nat. The culprit was, yeah, my recycling matters. But I just watched the. The CEO of Amazon fly to seven different countries.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I'm sitting here recycling.

[B]

If your employer doesn't recycle, it's. You're helping them destroy the Earth.

[C]

You know, it's up in our face now, though. I mean, I was just talking to, not talking to Matt about this before. Not that we have a green room, but before the, the show don't reveal everything fire.

[B]

We have a beautiful. It's got an Ames chair. We're in there all the time.

[A]

There was a spot.

[C]

Everything's on fire. So. Yeah, oh yeah, everything's on fire right now.

[B]

So we've been on flood watch a quarter of this year already. I've been home for a week with wildfire smoke. Like this did not used to happen in New York. We had coastal issues, but now we've got wildfire smoke, we've got forest fires. We're getting, you know, I think it's getting harder and harder to ignore. But I do agree that, you know, as, as we. Luckily things are aligned now. Right. Like our national security, our cost of living. All of these things are focusing in the need to reform our energy industry. And so at least people are seeing that.

[A]

Is it too late, though? I think, you know, for me one of the big problems was that I'll just. Al Gore turned out to be the Merrick Garland of climate change.

[B]

Like, you don't plug in a different light bulb.

[A]

No, I just mean, you know, we're, we're. When you, when you. I'm not a scientist. Right. But I do know that when you're predicting cat ism. Cataclysmic things to happen to the Earth, like you don't put a date on it. You don't say, this is going to happen in 10 years, this is going to happen in 20 years. Like I. That was so absolute. And when Chad was talking about the shaming and stuff, it was there. It felt like there was no compromise with anybody on anything related to climate change. It was all or nothing. I was, I spent a period of my time promoting new refineries in the United States and I was constantly getting canceled by the left. And I'm trying to tell them, do you Understand that a new refinery, you know, a new refinery built in 2023 can run almost 100% on renewable energy, be have 99.5% less efficient emissions than the refinery that we're using down the road that was built in 19. Like you're living on this planet where you think we're just going to stop using oil and natural gas, just wake up to the fact that it's going to be here for a long time. How do we produce it and refine it as responsibly as possible. That's why I wanted a new refinery. It's 99.5% cleaner than the old one. To me, that is progress in the climate change argument when you recognize that just like with natural gas, we need fertilizer to grow food, we need natural gas to have fertilizer. Like, there's some things that are just. And also a lot of people who never really read the climate change studies like I did, I read them like a lot. And so if, if we can reduce our dependency global on, on fossil fuels down to like 20 to 30% of what it is right now, we're basically neutral. Like the Earth will absorb that amount of CO2. It's, it's all of the additional CO2 we're creating that the Earth can't handle. So there's never been a day where we were going to be 100 off fossil fuels. That that's not a thing. And people believed I didn't understand what they were talking about. They were going off Al Gore and headlines and the shaming that Chad's talking about, the virtue signaling, all of that. And of course, hindsight's 20 20, right. I can sit here today and of course judge, and that's easy, but if you're really trying to sell something, sell the thing you can sell and then let's just be honest about it. Right. And I don't know, Nat, you're pretty big into climate change. You probably, I mean, no.

[B]

Was I not clear enough on the, the direction. I'm actually anti climate change. I think it shouldn't happen.

[A]

So when I, when I say you're note up on something, that's a Southern way of saying you understand it. That's an awful.

[B]

You said I was big on it, so I don't know, I just wanted

[A]

to, I mean, understanding it. Right. I, I assume you're someone that has some intimate knowledge of the studies and what they've said. And so I think you've probably heard what I'm talking about, like reducing it to 20 to 30.

[B]

Oh, absolutely. No, I mean this is, you know, if you serious climate. I used to work for, I'm no longer there, but I used to work for 350. Org and that was their, you know, that essentially their big goal was to go to the Copenhagen talks and convince the world leaders to cap climate emissions so that we would be able to keep it to 350 parts per million in the atmosphere. And the point of that was not that that is the perfect amount of carbon, but it is a sustainable and right like it was a level at which ideally climate change would not, not gain momentum and accelerate and carbon emissions would therefore no longer would not accelerate. And of course, you know, we fail to meet those standards. But the reason I mentioned that is because for a long time the global strategy has not been, look, I want to see us reduce and eliminate oil, but the idea is not to turn the pipeline off tomorrow. The idea is to create a way in which we can continue to feed and heal people and provide medicine, which are all things that energy does, does. And of course we can't say those things to be like, so you gotta burn fossil fuels forever because we need medicine. But we also can't have an interruption in that as we reduce these things. There are amounts of carbon that the atmosphere can automatically or can naturally process. However, we are drastically beyond those moments. And the other thing I want to add to that or draft drastically on those levels, add those times I'm talking about are over a decade in the past. One thing I want to add to what you said is, you know, I do say it's not individual responsibility, it's corporations. It's all these things. I want to add a caveat to that which you've brought this up in a lot of previous episodes. Conservation bills which do affect individual behavior are massively important. Like, and individuals supporting these things but like those affect our individual behaviors. My air conditioner, things like that that are running, those are individual actions. I, I, a lot of people took that study and I'm just being very clear about this, careful about this because a lot of people took that study that said, oh, 70% of climate emissions are caused by six corporations. That's the headline that I believe the Washington Post ran with and people have been repeating it for a decade saying it's not my fault, it's one of those six corporations fault. And I just, every time I want to be like, like, who's giving them money? You are you, there's only like eight corporations. You think you're shopping at the other two, like, no, it's six corporations. I'm blowing out my mic. I'm sure it's six corporations and their consumers. The problem is not like, oh, it's just these guys pumping oil into the river. They are, don't get me wrong. But it's like, it's like, no, the problem is that we only have like 10 companies and they are allowed to do whatever they want. So many people have taken that to be like, oh, I'm not the cause of climate change. It's like, unfortunately, you are. It's just that you stopping your personal behavior isn't going to solve the problem. It sucks that we found ourselves in this situation where we are complicit, but we can't individually solve the problem. But that is unfortunately the reality. So, like, I don't want to say, like, individual action doesn't matter at all. But you're right, we should have been sold this in a pragmatic way of like, here's how we're going to beat this thing, here's how we're going to save costs. Also, it was like three months ago that Democrats started getting comfortable saying, corporations are screwing you over. So it was the 90s. No one was going to be like, hey, these corporations, hey, you know how you love economic prosperity and everything being affordable for the first time in a while? That's actually bad. So, you know, it was. The consequences were far enough away that they weren't going to be challenging global prosperity or American prosperity at the time. And I think that was the real, the real weakness. This, because those companies are just allowed to decrease standards over, over the years, you know, get away with all sorts of, or, you know, you pay a small fee when you realize, oh, yeah, they poisoned entire community.

[A]

Yeah. And in the 90s, no one was telling me how much the, the manufacture, how much emissions the manufacturing of my parachute pants was putting into the air. Like, I didn't know that in the 90s. But what I do know is that everyone heard the term net zero

[B]

and,

[A]

and they eliminated the word net and just thought zero. Like, I had so many arguments with people who thought net zero meant zero.

[B]

That's gross.

[A]

And I'm like, no, there's a reason the word net exists, right? And, and that knows what the word net means, and Chad knows what the word net means. But when you're explaining people to people, things to people in society, you have to talk to them on a level that they can understand. And I think both parties fail miserably at that. Like, they are Terrible at talking to people in a way that they can understand. And, and if they say something and it's misunderstood, they just keep saying it over and over again thinking they're going to get it. And they're not. Like, I don't know how many hours I spent explaining net zero to people because they literally thought it meant zero emissions anywhere in the world. And I'm like, no, that's not a thing. And then they would say, I know what that's not a thing means. Okay, good, then we have a place to start because this is what net zero means.

[B]

Well, if you look at it, the. You're talking about Gore, like Inconvenient Truth was the messaging on climate change for a while. It was the pop culture impression of it for a while. And how does he end that movie? Do you remember?

[A]

He suggests everyone or something.

[B]

No, it's, it's. He says we have to solve climate change and then he tells everyone to. It's like, we have, we have 10 years to stop climate change. So you had to go to a high efficiency bulb and all the electrical outlets in your home. I was like, what? I at the time, remember watching that. I was like, like, I'm looking at this guy. I'm like, you have Strom Thurman's home address and you're telling me to put better bulbs in my, in my shitty little dorm room? Like that's what you're, that's what's going to do it. Like, you know the names and home addresses of all the people causing this problem and profiting it from it. Al Gore, Ambassador Al Gore. You're going to tell me it's on me? I don't think that's going to on. On the people who paid money to see the climate change movie. Speaking of climate activism being thoroughly middle class for too long, of course it's affecting poor people in the global south first, but at the time it was like a middle class pursuit in America too much culturally. And it was like, yeah. Oh. So the people who go see this movie, who paid to see a mo. A documentary about climate change arousing Saturday, they're going to change their bulbs. That was the big takeaway from that movie. Movie.

[A]

I just want to point out that Chad is actively living his own Inconvenient truth as he's sitting there with his house filling up with smoke because the entire western one third of the United States is on fire.

[B]

Hey, I know I insulted our YouTube viewers earlier in this episode and said, I don't know why people watch podcasts on YouTube. But if you have, you will notice that the nature of the grid in New York has cost the lights to brown three times during this episode. So we're all living through it now.

[C]

Well, I'll just, I'll just kind of close out with before we do our least worst stuff. But I'll say that one of the ways always that we seem to get in gear when it comes to stuff like this is to feel vulnerable. And so when you look at countries that kind of harkening back to the energy as a weapon thing that are the most vulnerable to the weaponization of energy, you see countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and they're heavily focused on trying to get into this renewable stage. And it's not because they want to help the environment. Yeah, there's that aspect that is probably number three on the list. And they want cheaper power. That's probably number two on the list. But number one is the fact that 94% of their energy comes from a boat from somewhere else. And so they need to replace that same thing with South Korea. But a really fascinating stat is one of the countries that is building the fastest renewables is Ukraine. Ukraine because. And it's wild because Ukraine is an oil producer through and through. They're on the same level. They do the same things as Russia, former Soviet nation, love oil. But they are one of the fastest producers of renewable energy, builders of renewable energy, because they need to be able to. Those are more resilient systems than even nuclear. Nuclear is a target. It's not necessarily targeted in a way,

[B]

it's one source of a lot of your kilowatt hours. Right?

[C]

Yeah, it would be devastating to do that. And there would be a big backlash internationally if Russia decided to bomb like Zaporizhzhia or something like that. But they're, they're oil fired plants. A lot of those older Soviet era fossil fuel burning plants are what Russia's targeting. So they're like, we need something that's faster, cheaper and can continue to provide heat through these rough Ukrainian winters. And so they're, they are, they're building out not only solar, but wind power. And they're also focusing on trying to do something out in the Black Sea because the Black Sea has become somewhat of a neutral zone when it comes to strikes because one the, the Black Sea fleet, the Russian navy is just not capable there anymore because of Ukraine's ability to inflict damage on it. But also there's these agreements between Ukraine and Russia and other countries that allow the free shipment of Things like food. So they're like, well, we can, if that's the free shipment is there, we can maybe offshore wind. And so Ukraine is at an absolute necessity for their survival going to renewable because they know that that is easier to repair, easier to, to build out is cheaper, and it gets their people at least some ability to cook food and have heat. So I mean, fortunately, but unfortunately, the United States isn't going to experience that. We have a lot of energy. We don't necessarily need, need the, the renewables other than we really should be for the environmental aspect, the cheapness, and just generally it's a better system for powering our future. The Ukrainians, the Taiwanese, the South Koreans, they have people that are threatening them in their backyard or actively attacking them, and they're moving hard into the renewables for that reason. And if we can explain to the American people, hey, Hormuz is just a small portion of what could really happen to us if we have a true energy crisis. Crisis because we rely so much on fossil fuels. And I think going forward, that might be, as Matt was saying, that might be another good avenue to, to, to sell to the American people. Vulnerability is powerful.

[B]

So, and as we have discussed earlier in this episode and in other ones, we as Americans, it is changing. In the past 20, 25 years, especially the past 10 years, we are used to an exceptionally high standard of comfort. And effectively, that is why it was hard to do. A, a, a distant harbinger of doom in the 1990s is that culturally, it takes a lot of pain for the American people to move on something. And we didn't. We, we don't want to make things harder for ourselves. We'll just endure discomfort. Like there's, we'll just like endure, you know, what, increased prices or things like, we will, we don't. Or we'll endure the fear of a threat for, for immediate comforts almost all of the time. And that is, you know, that's a larger question as to, like, how do we prepare our country, you know, assuming we survive the current rise of autocracy and we manage to survive or stem the tide of climate change so we don't lose every species on the planet and only about half of them at that point. How does America see problems coming 30 or 40 years around the bend in the future is a question we'll have to ask ourselves because I think ultimately, as a consumer culture, if it's not bothering us personally right now, we're not dealing with it. And like, you know, like I said, luckily in huge Air quotes. People now know that climate change is real and that's the, you know, we lost some opportunities in recent previous decades, but now at least we can build on the fact that people. Yeah, people are feeling it.

[A]

Yeah, for sure.

[B]

How does Ukraine have time to build more infrastructure structure? You'd think they'd be pretty busy right now.

[C]

They're incredibly resilient and brilliant. They just are very.

[B]

I mean these are being sarcastic. I'm like even. No, you're like the, the. Where is the inter. Like where's the manpower coming for the war effort and rebuilding their energy infrastructure?

[C]

They are very good at prioritizing and there's similar. Women are standing up and filling those gaps much like what we saw in like the Rosie the Riveter era of World War II. But also they're good at having a national idea. I mean this is a situation where these people have a existential threat. They either do it or they die. And so that's a very powerful situ for the elderly to come out of retirement for a 16 year old to start doing things like plowing the field while his father's fighting, stuff like that. So, and there's an entire episode that's really could be great because just focusing on the fact that the United States like our companies, like, like Lockheed doesn't necessarily want to provide Patriot missiles to the Patriot missile plans on how to build them to Ukraine because they're worried that they will make them better than the US and that's a problem for Lockheed's profit margins. And so they. There's this concern that the Ukrainians are so smart and resilient right now that they're doing things that we would have never thought of had this war not happened. And as I said, vulnerability and the existential threat, that's a very powerful tool. And so they're finding to ways noise to build out the wounded. You can't fight anymore. They're still going to work. And so it's quite impressive and incredible.

[B]

Thank God for Lockheed protecting our American right to be lazy and stupid though God forbid we let anyone else take a crack at it who might be willing to work hard. I want to go. This has been a really interesting episode and I think like you said, Chad, we could go to a whole other episode on that. But we have talked for a while and I want to go to our final segment of the episode in which we highlight something from the past seven days that if not a positive story, a less negative story than usual and leave you on something to think about. It is A segment we like to call the Least Worst Part of My Week. Would either of you guys like to start out? Okay, go ahead, Matt. Take it away.

[A]

This is a great story that I've known about for all of seven minutes. And so there's a gentleman.

[B]

While I was talking earlier, I know why now.

[A]

He was a dreamer. Okay? And so that lends credibility to the story to me. Anyway, his name's Thallus d' Souza, and he is currently attending his first year pre law at Yale University via being a shift manager at Wendy's who could not afford to go to college and approached his boss and said, I am going. This is when he was in high school. He said, I'm going to have to go find me a job, like in construction or something, you know, once I graduate because I can't make enough money to support myself. I can't go to school.

[C]

School.

[A]

And his boss said, no, sir, you're not going to do that. We're going to help you go to college. So his boss and his boss's, his business partner set aside some money every week for Thalis to Souza and got him into a community college where he then made straight A's and eventually earned a scholarship to go to Yale. So this guy who was working at Wendy's, he was a dreamer. His parents brought him over as a young teenager working at Wendy's really had no prospects, but was obviously a standout employee. He obviously a very bright individual. His bosses stood up and said, no, we're going to help you out. You're not going to quit. We're going to set aside some money. They ended up paying for most of his. He went to a little nothing community college that no one ever heard of, straight A's, went to a bigger community college, straight A's, and then got a scholarship to go to Yale. So he's now in his first year pre law at Yale because someone saw his potential working at Wendy's. An immigrant of a different skin color working at Wendy's saw his potential invested in him. And now he's pre law at Yale. So congratulations to Mr. D'.

[B]

Souza.

[A]

I think it's a fantastic story. I love stories like that where people help lift someone up from the lower rungs of society, so to speak, and put them on a rocket ship. And so being a law student at Yale is obviously going to change this man's life. Coming from Brazil, Brazil as a dreamer to the United States and now he's pre law at Yale. And I'm super happy for that gentleman.

[B]

Yeah. And it is. You know, I hate that it became a culture war thing, but it's nice to hear any good news about recipients of the DREAM Act. Just because it became a target for Trump and the whole conservative apparatus.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

Truly. Because it was an Obama project, I think. Not just because it was immigrants, because it was a. I think it was a spiteful move against it. So it's a nice. It's nice to hear successes for those people who, who came here under a program that was supposed to give them a better life, and then people who really didn't deserve to be the political focus of a huge attack. Some of them, even their own names got exposed. People got exposed as recipients of the dream. So it's great to hear good things happening for them. And I also say the guys at Wendy's putting away a little bit of money from each of their paycheck to pay for someone's college gives me this really great idea. What if everyone in this country a little bit of our paycheck check went to, like, a big fund and then we could all go to college. It's just an idea I had. And we could also do it for, like, healthcare or something. I don't know. It's just. I'm just coming up spitballing right now. Just a thought. Maybe for another episode, but if anyone wants to try other places, I guess so. Has anyone done that? Has anyone.

[A]

You know, geography is different over there. That doesn't mean.

[B]

Oh, it's probably totally different. Yeah, it's probably like hilly or something.

[A]

They have more hills than we do.

[B]

They have more. Fewer or fewer hills. And so it's. There's no way it could ever work here.

[C]

You're right.

[B]

I should. You over there. I should. I. I should die uneducated, of a curable disease because of the different terrain here. You're right. I feel like I always make your least worse. More negative. My room's getting darker. The. The energy is going out in my neighborhood. Chad, what's the least worst part of your week?

[C]

This one's pretty cool. So before I get into the least worse part of it, I'm going to give you the. The bad part of it. So. So one of the things that's a byproduct of every war, the worst part of this whole thing, there's a byproduct of nearly every major war that is fought, and that is mines that are left behind. And the reality for mines is about 2,000 people worldwide are killed by unexploded ordinance that has just been left behind by previous wars and the propensity of it is children because they're out there playing in fields and stuff. Another 4300 ended up getting injured from these with wounds that clearly are life altering, blood blowing off their limbs and things like that. But after. So one of the major wars that had a massive problem with mines was Bosnia, the, the Bosnia and Herzegovina war. So all of the partners in that region who, who previously were at war, they're not partners, they who previously were fighting the wars and things like that. All of those groups that had that animosity are starting to come together and creating joint budgetary measures to fund mine clearing efforts. So right now there's about, about in left in Bosnia, there's about 775 square kilometers of, of mines that need to be cleared. Granted you have to, they've been trying to clear mines. Third party countries usually have been doing it. But one of them being the US and USAID being shut off by Trump has removed a lot of this mine clearing effort by the US which is unfortunate because it was actually a great training event for us too. But regardless, these countries are now again filling the vacuum left by the United States and they're creating joint budgets to address mines and this. And it's not just necessarily Bosnia. These are old wars that across the world because these mines, they just continue to pop up. I mean I think Great Britain just a few days ago ended up having to blow up an unexplored ordinance because the river receded to such a level that it exposed one. So this is constantly fascinating story. Sorry, I'm going to do a side bar.

[B]

Go ahead.

[C]

Talking about fires up in the foothills of Boise here where I live, all because of the climate change. The fires are just really bad here. Firefighters had to stop fighting the fires because they were coming across unexploded ordinance that the back in like the 20s and 30s, the Fort Boise Military Installation would use the foothills to fire artillery into just for training because Boise was so small that the foothills were, were just there. So fire into it. And this created these fires, cleared out the brush and the firefighters had to leave because there was unexploded ordinance there. And the National Guard had to go out and detonate them and blow them up to make it safe again. Not, not every country has that capability. So children in places like Bosnia or you even talk about the Middle east and Syria and things like that, where Russia has deployed mines, a lot of efforts are being made to limit to shrink those footprints. And unfortun the minefields in Ukraine are currently still growing. And that's going to be a generational problem they're going to have to deal with eventually. But for now, old war or old battlefields are getting additional funding from both sides of the conflict, interestingly, to come together to clear these minds so children are safer.

[B]

So that's great news. I hate hearing how much damage we've done to the world world or they've done to the world by discontinuing usaid. But it is nice to know that that's not the, you know, we're not the global superpower for aid. I mean, we are in many ways, but we're not the only source of aid globally. And it's nice to know that, that America is not the world's babysitter. And now all of these issues.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

What you got now?

[B]

What do I got? I actually have a least worst that I'll probably talk about again when it actually happens. But I, I want to promote this because it's going to come up in September here in New York on September 20 here to be working with CU Boulder, which is, you know, Colorado University, Boulder. I work with them in Colorado as well. But are you doing an event for

[C]

New York, New York Annex? I was like the New York Annex of New York?

[B]

Well, the truth is I work for them and I just teach classes remotely because or I work with their students remotely on art related to the climate crisis. So, you know, sketch comedy videos, stand up monologue, blogs, animation, things like that. And they have this really great program called Inside the Greenhouse. Essentially the idea is to create art, to create media entertainment that deals with the climate crisis in a way that's actually accessible and entertaining. And you know, I love to rail on Inconvenient Truth because like I said, the people who would pay money to go see a climate science documentary were already on board and you gave them bad advice at the end. End. But people who would never watch a documentary about climate change will definitely watch a 90 second standup clip on their phone. They'll watch a funny sketch video. They'll, you know, they'll engage with the media that they already engage with. So they do a lot of really great work in training students to do stuff like that. And then they just put on a really fun comedy show every year. And we've done them in New York and la. But for the first time here in New York, we are going to be running a climate comedy workshop workshop for, for Young Comedians for Climate Week. And I'll have more details on that coming soon. But I, I'm going to be working with some local comedians and we're going to have like a free all day workshop at Fordham and we are going to work with a group of like local students and comedians and help them develop their own material about, not necessarily about the climate crisis. When people ask me about this, I say, well, you know, I do five minutes on hybrid cars. I do have. I got my bit about solar panels. I got my bit about being a vegan. Vegan, which I'm, you'll learn in the bit. I'm, I'm not a vegan. I, I tried, but I'm doing my best. I'm doing my best, but I mean, I still eat meat. The point being, it's a hard thing to joke about. But remember, you know, people do political jokes on late night on the Daily show every day and climate crisis is just one of those tough topics that you got to figure out the right way to talk about. So I'm very happy to say that, yeah, in Climate week this year, I am going to be leading a workshop for, for young comedians on how to do comedy about the climate crisis that doesn't suck. They didn't call it that, but I'm going to ask them to put that in the description. And that is the least worst part of my week and hopefully also the least worst part of the week of September 20th. And that's going to be cool. Yeah, I'm psyched for it. We've done it before and I've worked with students from Boulder, but it was like you had to be enrolled. And we're going to have a program for people who are in New York and who aren't necessarily in the university system.

[C]

So.

[B]

Well, also, you know, working with actual young comedians who already have some momentum. So it'll be cool. And I think at that we are at the end of our episode. Thank you so much to everyone for listening. This has been American Power from Find Out Media. Follow us on every social media platform that's legal. And if not, I hope that that lawyer, who is also a dreamer, will represent me as I delete. As I direct you to Mr. Global's illegal deepfake. Only for fans. Again, I've been your host, Nat. Really trying to thread the needle there. I tied it all together pretty neatly there. I'm your host, Nat Town, professional podcast host for Mr. Global and Chad Scott. This has been American Power from Find Out Media. Remember, power corrupts, but American power corrupts Americanly.